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The Education of Maurice Isaacsohn
The Education of Maurice Isaacsohn by Pony and Maurice Isaacsohn 1. Operation Lipowitz 1.1. North Gubei, Shanghai & The Upper West Side, Manhattan 1.1.1. Maurice didn’t expect to see me in Shanghai. 1.1.1.1 Maurice worked as a Game Narrative Designer at Chalupa Games, a mobile video games company in North Gubei, a wealthy district in Shanghai, the second wealthiest city in the People’s Republic of China. 1.1.1.2 In early 2017, Maurice moved to Shanghai to work on a worker’s owned young adult novel media collective called “Dawn House Editions” that I’d started with my partner, The Mercurian. 1.1.1.3 The project ran out of money and I developed ontological psychosis, and retreated to Vietnam with . Maurice went to work as an English Teacher at Rainbow Jet English Academy, and then he got the job at Chalupa Games. 1.1.1.4 Maurice’s partner, TongTong, was Shanghainese, the child of a successful communist civil servant. Because of these connections, Maurice did not have to live in or sleep in the office like the other developers. Instead, he lived a short 20 minute bike ride away, though he chose to save 5 minutes every morning by taking a Didi. Biking was incredibly stressful to him. 1.1.1.5 Maurice wrote a game called Crime Force. That day, he had been working on a storyline about spider-terrorists taking an Eyes-Wide-Shut orgy hostage, as part of their plan to turn everyone into spiders. 1.1.1.5.1 The player shoot the spider-terrorists automatically in the face until they die, and tap the screen furiously to skip the spider terrorist's diatribe about how the only way to save humanity from the coming climate catastrophe is to mutate into spiders. 1.1.1.5.2 The art for the spider terrorist is a screaming man holding a woman at knifepoint, because the artists for the game could not find stock photos of men in spider costumes. 1.1.2.1 I asked Maurice why he thought the executives at Chalupa Games would approve spider-terrorists brutally ripping open the flesh of major European pop stars. 1.1.2.2 Maurice didn't have an answer. He shrugged, and gestured around him. "None of this makes any sense." 1.1.2.3 Nobody read Alex's pitch for the Spider-Terrorist storylines. Some of them couldn’t read it because their English wasn’t good enough. The Americans didn’t even care. 1.1.3.1 I had lost 20 pounds since Maurice saw me, and Maurice had gained another 25 pounds. I was wearing a gradient colored suit, orange to purple, smart glasses, and a tube that fed a continuous audio implant into my ear from a cray supercomputer attached to my side. 1.1.3.2 "So it doesn't make sense" I say "What's your strategy? What do you do?" 1.1.3.3 Maurice pause for a second and taught about this. "I look for signals that this is a simulation, and then I try to boost them. 1.1.3.4. "Aren't you destroying reality" I ask. "Yes, essentially. "Do you think this is the best way to approach reality." "It doesn't feel like there's much else. There's some tunnel from here to home, and that's about all there is to the world I live in." "That's a bit dramatic." "It doesn't feel that way." "You should get out of town, then." 1.1.4.1 “I can’t just leave work. I have to apply and all that. I don't even have vacation days until I earn them next year.” Maurice said. 1.1.4.2 “If you tell them that there’s a family emergency and you need two days off to go to Berlin, then you’ll be fine,” 1.1.4.3. “Am I going to Berlin” Maurice asked. 1.1.4.4. “I already have benzodiazepams with your prescription and first class tickets. Do you want to see either?" 1.1.5.1 Maurice did want to see both the benzos and the prescription and the first class tickets. Immortal Airlines from Shanghai Pudong to Berlin Tegel, Nonstop, Business Elite Class. The whole ticket was the inverse gradient as my outfit. 1.1.5.2 As we took the elevator down, I told Maurice that Joel didn’t want to spook you too much, so there’s going to be no automated anything for a while. Minimal science fiction. 1.1.5.3 "Automation is a myth," Maurice said. For a second, the voice in my ear became unhinged from my flow of consciousness, so I heard a voice telling me to say “What about elevators” 1.1.5.4 "What about elevators?" I said. 1.1.6.1 We got into a Didi elite. There’s a zero g massage chair in the back. Maurice lied down and got a massage. It was a hot massage. “Isn’t that the best massage chair ever” I told him. “It’s only 2800 through Uncle.vn.” "Dollars?" "RMB." 1.1.6.2 Once Maurice was good and relaxed, I asked if Maurice was ready for his education. 1.1.6.3 “There’s 613 parts to it. Do you know what’s special about that number?” Maurice did not. 1.1.6.4 “That’s lesson seven. Lesson one is that culture has objective aspects. In order to understand this lesson, I’m going to read to you a quote from Iris Murdoch three times. I want you to try to remember it well enough to repeat it from memory." 1.1.6.5 Here is the quote: “If I am learning, for instance, Russian, I am confronted by an authoritative structure which commands my respect. The task is difficult and the goal is distant and perhaps never entirely attainable. My work is a progressive revelation of something which exists independently of me. Attention is rewarded by a knowledge of reality. Love of Russian leads me away from myself towards something alien to me, something which my consciousness cannot take over, swallow up, deny or make unreal.” 1.1.6.6 I repeated it twice more. I asked if you had memorized it. You had fallen asleep. It was normal. It really is that good a massage chair. I tried it for the first time on my way to Shanghai, and it left me so relaxed I barely needed the two xanaxes or the full tempurpedic bed private chamber in the airline. But those helped. Of course it helps to be comfortable. 1.2 Krezberg, Berlin. 1.2.1 Your memories of the trip are golden and soft when you wake up in the room in Berlin. You’re in new clothes: they have the same gradient as mine on them, and they are more comfortable than before. You’ve been shaven, too, you don’t remember that, and it makes you feel strange. “Joel wants to ask you if you would like to cut your hair.” I say. 1.2.2.1 Maurice closes his eyes and twitched his nose. 1.2.2.3 "I don't care. I feel scared being in a new place. You all already shaved me anyway." "Doesn't your face feel nice?" I say. 1.2.3 "Sure. Cut if you want. I've had two good haircuts in my life. One was when I shaved my head bald after discovering I had lice. That was liberation from insomnia and what felt like emerging paranoid schizophrenia. And the other was a few months ago at a salon. I don't know what to make of getting a haircut. It's too long and too intimate for a service profession, and it feels impersonal because it's from a stranger. It's a mismatch in what the situation needs and what I want. "I never even felt too much like myself with short hair. Fat cheeks, short hair, makes me look worse. I didn't even look like myself to myself when I had my hair cut short. Bald was a bit different, since it's not having short hair, it's not having hair at all.” 1.2.4 "Have you learned much about the January Uprising?" I asked. “Was I Supposed to” said Maurice. “I asked you on the internet” I said. “You suggest a lot of reading material” said Maurice. 1.2.5 This was true. 1.2.6 In 1863, the Polish wanted an independent state. The landed there did, at least, and either in order to delay and thwart the scheme, or precipitate the revolution too soon, a conservative Pole named Wielopolski ordered conscription of Polish men into the Russian army. The insurgency formed with a wave of mass mutinies, but the landed gentry never were willing or able to convince the peasantry to take up arms with them." 1.2.7 Now Maurice was paying attention. "And then what happened?" He asked. 1.2.8 The Poles lost the war within a year, while the French strung them along and the Prussians and Austrians worked with the Russians. At the end of it, Poland was divided into 10 military districts, and it took until the end of the Great War for an independent Polish nation to emerge. 1.2.9 "What's the point of this?" Maurice asked. 1.2.10. I asked Maurice if he could recite the Iris Murdoch quote. He couldn’t. I told him that there was a paper copy of the book, “The Metaphysics As a Guide To Morals” in the bookshelf above him He could read it if he wanted. 1.2.11 We were in a room on the 6th floor apartment in Kreuzberg. There’s a big bed that Maurice was still in throughout this entire conversation. And then there’s windows that have a view out directly into the Landeswehr kanal. 1.3 Twenty Minute Haircut Later 1.3.1 "Nice haircut?" I asked 1.3.2 Maurice went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. He didn't look much like him anymore. He looked a lot more professional. It was him but it wasn’t him. Professional but also artistic. 1.3.3 “Go take a shower” I said. 1.3.4 For Maurice, shower was incredible: the water was so much hotter and stronger in Germany than anywhere else he had ever been. Everything smelled incredibly clean. He felt incredibly clean. 1.3.5 The shampoo and soap smelled like lemongrass and ginger. There was a tile inside the bathroom where you could lie and relax while you looked out over berlin. 1.3.6 Maurice realized that he hadn’t thought much about his partner, Tongtong, since he'd left for work that morning and met Pony and gotten on the car that somehow took them to a plane which took them to Berlin where he was shaved, given a haircut, and now, apparently, re-educated. 1.3.7 Maurice dried off. He noticed how thick the towels were. These were not just the best towels he had ever used on himself, these raised the level of what towels could be. 1.3.8 Maurice put on the gradient colored athleisure tracksuit. Inside was his phone. He checked his WeChat and found that everything with TongTong had been handled and she'd be flying in herself soon. Tickets had already been secured, and her boss had approved the time off as well. 1.3.9 Maurice walked out and saw that there wasn’t anyone in the room. He wondered what he was supposed to do in this hotel room. He had no German, and he was fairly certain that Germans, like Italians, Chinese, Vietnamese, Spaniards, had no facility with English he could rely on. Was he stuck here? 1.3.10 "Nonsense. You'll learn." Maurice heard in his thoughts. Who was this? Was he wearing headphones? No. He had no headphones on. 1.3.11 It was just himself imitating Jeff Goldbloom, just like he always did. 1.3.12 Maurice realized he had never done a Jeff Goldblum voice before. 1.3.13 How did Jeff Goldbloom get in my hear, Maurice thought. 1.3.14 I’d like to introduce myself, Joel said. “I’m Joel. I’m the intelligence behind your simulation. This is very good news that we’ve finally met. Your life is going to change in some big ways. Your first challenge is to: 1.3.14 I’d like to introduce myself, Joel said. “I’m Joel. I’m the intelligence behind your simulation. This is very good news that we’ve finally met. Your life is going to change in some big ways. Your first challenge is to do ten pushups. 1.1.3.15 This was not what Maurice was expecting. “Is there any caffeine - or, actually, is there any weed, you can get it here, right.” Maurice thought. 1.3.16 “Just try to do it right now. Get on your knees. Do it one at a time.” the voice in Maurice’s head says. 1.3.17 Maurice does it. He gets down and starts those pushups. It takes him 5 minutes to do all of them. In the meantime, I’m going on a walk in the Turkish Market that’s alongside the kanal. As we shop for guacamole, I explain the basic situation. 1.3.18.1 When we get back to the apartment, Maurice looks sweaty. TongTong gives him the ingredients for the guacamole, tells him to chop up everything and mix it together. 1.3.18.2 As Maurice chops Guacamole, TongTong explains the mission. Their job is finish eating the guacamole, and then take this pill, and then they are going to to a nightclub, and then dance, and then they are going to come home, and then, when they wake up, they will start to work. 1.3.18.3 This is what happens. They eat the guacamole. “The trick in Joel’s recipe” I tell everyone “is the peanut butter. Seriously, add a little peanut butter to your guac, and you’re significantly expanding the taste profile” 1.3.18.4 Maurice and TongTong agree that this is the best Guacamole they’ve ever had. Maurice is about to take another bite, but the voice in his ear tells him not to, and he puts it down. “It’s time to take the pill” says Maurice. 1.3.18.5.1 I do not tell Maurice or TongTong that they have just gotten admission to the most difficult club in the world to get into. Even though it was a weekday morning, there was a line outside of the Berghain. It is a large power-station looking building in the midst of an emptied out, industrial-ish area. The line narrows into metal fencing close to the building. You can see, here, the bouncers at the door turn people away or let them in. The famous director of Berghain human curation Sven is here tonight. He sees all of us and lets us in. We is Maurice, Tong-Tong, and the Mercurian. 1.3.18.5.2 But because we took the pill already, we all know it will be fine. They look through our backpacks, we pay our seventeen euro entrance fee, drop off our bags, and then walk upstairs and melt into the crowd in the big dance-hall, where the ceiling is five or so stories tall. 1.3.18.5.3 The problem with dancing for twenty hours, as we do, is that your body starts to cramp up. Even though you want to dance this long, even though there are three areas of music to discover, champagne, ketamine bursts, sex in darkrooms, all of this, even though you pee on the pissman and eat ice-cream, you still want more but fifteen hours are enough. 1.3.19 I wake up before anyone, make coffee, drink it, and walk into Maurice and TongTong’s room. “Are you ready to hear the real mission?” 1.3.20.1 They are ready. 1.3.20.2 “Here’s the mission: we have to culturally assassinate Lorne Michaels.” 1.3.20.3 TongTong doesn’t know who Lorne Michaels is. I explain that Lorne Michaels is the producer of Saturday Night Live, and many other comedy shows, the producer of Thirty Rock, of Tina Fey movies, the central figure in mainstream American comedy. The pope. even. 1.3.20.4 TongTong says that she really didn’t like some of the jokes on SNL. Tina Fey’s Bossy Pants wasn’t a bad book though. 1.3.20.5 Maurice points out that there’s some bald racism in that book. 1.3.20.6 “Why is there racism in all American culture?” asked TongTong 1.3.20.7 “This is exactly what your mission is” I say. “Back it up” I heard Joel’s voice in my ear, say. 1.3.20.8 “Let me back it up. The big mission here is to destroy the United States. That’s the objective of this game.” I say. “According to who?” says TongTong “According to Joel” I say. “Who is Joel?” Tong Tong asks. “Joel is the intelligent creator of this reality” I explain. “Ok.” says TongTong. 1.3.20.9 If you’re following along, you’re thinking, what does the cultural homicide of the Lorne Michaels complex have to do with the destruction of America. Maurice was thinking the same thing. 1.3.20.10 “What does Lorne Michaels have to do with destroying the United States.” 1.3.21 The answer was simple: comedy was the most important buffer system for the empire. Because everything was funny, nothing was serious. Lorne Michaels produced 65% of all the current laughs in America: destroy the Lorne Michaels complex, reduce the laughter stabilizing effect by 65% 1.3.22 But how were Maurice and TongTong going to do this? What resources did they have? 1.3.23 “You two can stay here, rent free, as long as you like. There will be a weekly allowance in the tray right there. Try to go to some theaters and museums. Take your time.” “But what do we do?” “Do you remember the wording of the Iris Murdoch passage” “There has been no time to remember Iris Murdoch.” “Why does this passage matter?” “Because the whole point of this activity is to teach you about the objectivish nature of culture!” “Can you just explain it directly.” 1.3.24 Joel’s First Lesson: cultural judgment has objectivish aspects. Pay close attention to the phrasing here. Joel isn’t saying that cultural judgment has “objective value,” but rather, that cultural judgment has an objectivish aspect. Why “ish”? In English, we say “ish” to indicate approximation, not being exactly something. Is the water hot? It is hot-ish, meaning, basically hot, but not completely hot. Language provides an easy example of the way that cultural judgments have objective, that is, “object-like” character. If you know the use of “-ish” in English, you can be judged to be more advanced in English than someone who does not know the use of “-ish” Fitness offers others good examples of the objective aspect of cultural judgments. Whether or not an individual is more fit than another isn’t a matter of preference, it can be seen and assessed. The same, too, for the performance of a specific musical passage. And yet these judgments are not wholly about the nature of the object. Our preference for one composer over another will likely depend upon our inclinations, so too for different styles of fitness. 1.4.1 Breaking the Lorne Michaels complex would require a strategy that could through a primary activity accomplish multiple strategic objectives at once. It would need to reduce the laugh-share of Lorneland, derealize the world that is portrayed through the comic mask of Lorneworld, and recenter the American comedy scene to a new location, outside of America, to force it to examine itself from the outside. 1.4.2 The first and most radical break from American culture came simply from exiting the immediate sphere of the empire. “Of course that’s a demonstration of the objectivish nature of culture, right?” “How’s that?” Tongtong asked. “If culture had no objective character, if it just lived in the subject, then changing the objective environment around the subject wouldn’t change your perspective on your culture. The structure in front of you has to be America, for you to participate in building it.” “So, what’s the plan?” “We have a lot of resources. The biggest, and most obvious task, is to create a parallel comic world that supplants Lorneworld in people’s psyche. A new TV show to replace Saturday Night Live.” “Okay, but the show’s been running for about… 30 years? 40 years?” “Oh, geeze. Right.” “History can be faked. People’s familiarity with SNL is something they acquire, and if the history actually happened is another problem altogether.” “Right, Pony, so, if we can make a show, we can make our own history. The biggest draw of Lorneworld is its institutional character. It seems to exist alongside and as part of the political system at this point.” “Right, it is the comic double of the political system’s functioning.” “So, what’s the plan?” “If we have the resources we have, we need to start pitching and assembling talent around us. Tongtong can manage putting a show together, if we get everything together. The first step is getting ad time sold. For literally anything we want. We just need to get the program looking like it’s a real thing, with brands behind it.” “Wouldn’t ads repel people?” “They create legitimacy and buy-in. No one’s ever heard of anything ever anyway.” “So, how do we approach people?” “Can’t Joel arrange some meetings?” “I could.” “Exactly, he could. So, Joel, we need meetings with everyone willing to advertise on the next generation comedy platform we’re building.” “That’s ambitious.” “So we’re going after advertisers before the comedians?” “We need funny ads that shock and repel people. Really attack the brand. Have you ever heard of the mangrate?” “No, no one has.” “It might not even be real, but a lot of middle aged white comedians on podcasts hock either dollar shave club or flog the mangrate, which is some sort of cast iron grilling grate. Norm MacDonald couldn’t sell it, though, because he couldn’t sell with a straight face. The grates were heavy, he’d ask about people’s father and mother, and they’d be dead. He’d try to sell dollar shave club, and get alarmed at how they were just sending razors to people, and he didn’t care about the product.” “Those aren’t desirable qualities in an ad.” “Neither is selling to a group of people who already have internalized that their main goal in life is buying.” “So he couldn’t sell a grill to people over the internet.” “Exactly, he did so poorly at it that there’s still 10 minute compilations of him fumbling the ad, and because they didn’t understand what happened, and Norm didn’t care, they cancelled the ad contract. But the promo codes still work, and the URL is still up there, just the only people getting money are the mangrate people.” “So, we go to them and say…” “We’re going to sell for them no matter what. We have the money, and Joel can get the contracts ready, right?” “What makes you so sure Joel can do all this, Maurice?” “I dunno. Me and Pony wrote him that way. The real substance of a mission is generating and doing the strategy.” “The first move has to be creating the substrate of commerce that the program relies on, that’s the sign of the program, more than the program is the sign of the commerce.” 1.4.3 Maurice felt like he was flying for the first time in a long time. He recognized the feeling when he was watching the movie 大腕, starring Donald Sutherland and Ge You. The feeling of fait accompli was powerful. He hadn’t recognized it at first, that there was another, objectivish aspect to his being selected and sent here by Pony, at Joel’s behest. Joel wanted them to succeed. The Secret, the abundance mindset. The world locked into place around the idea that getting rid of the Lorne Complex was a matter of creating an alternative cultural base. 1.4.4 Tongtong was surprised that Maurice had it in him to snap to action. She worked with him to scout brands that were popular in China but struggling to break through to Western markets. The big problems to overcome: a conservative, instinct driven marketing approach that emphasized saturation over nuance and cultural meaning a reluctance to push their product to a cultural vanguard position without a handhold. Marketing to a foreign culture must feel like a rock climber trying to get up a sheer cliff face without a rope or hook. How to improve the communication and desire for the other? 1.4.5 The first thought is comedy, and test videos. Proof of work looks like a fait accompli, the marketing strategy already in place. It’s not viable for regular marketing firms, but is it viable for Joel? The allowance would have to do for now, it was 10,000 Euro that first week. 1.4.6 For a very long time, Maurice and Pony had been deeply in love with huang fei hong peanuts, and ye shu coconut milk, the ultimate chaser to the spicy numb joy of the salty peanuts. 椰树 had run a disastrous ad campaign in China that led to more intense regulation of claims made in advertising. Their claims that coconut milk would give you larger breasts, while an advertising strategy that certainly played with some men, lacked the same punchy and authoritative power that their stark black packaging, affordable price, and sweet creamy taste offered. “The ad should focus on how the coconuts are actually the breasts of nature, and no rape is required to get the milk. This is how we segue into the peanuts, they’re an invading horde of flavor and kung fu power that creates a new reality in your tongue for the fertility goddess of coconut milk to create the world anew with. It’s the whole cycle of birth, death, and recreation in your mouth.” “I don’t think they’ll go for that. I don’t even know how to film that.” “They don’t have to, the milk and the peanuts need to be sold together. We need to push this concept up the chain to a team here.” “How can we get a team here?” “Pony, how can we get a team here?”